Starting iTrail

Left is a screen-shot of the home screen from iTrail. To start iTrail measuring your location, altitude, speed and distance, just press the start button on the bottom left, to stop measuring press the stop button on the bottom right. To reset everything press reset, the bottom middle button. Used in this way iTrail will not record any performance data to its internal database. See below to understand how to record this data.

iTrail has a lockable screen so that recording your trail will be less disrupted by environmental conditions. Just press the padlock to lock, then slide the slider to unlock.



Data can me shown in metric units, meters and kilometres, or in imperial units, miles and feet. You can switch between these two modes by using the settings menu accessed by pressing the Settings button on the right of the tab bar.


Recording your work-out - Create a new Trail.

 iTrail can record all your workout data to its internal database, so that you can view and understand it later. In order to do this you need to create a new trail. 

This is done by pressing the New Trail button on the tab bar at the bottom. When you do this you will see the screen on the left.

On this screen you can give your trail a title to describe it, and select which sport you are doing. After you've done all this press the create trail button and you should see the screen below left.

After having created the trail and pressed the start button, you should see this screen, it will tell you your location's longtitude and latitude, altitude, speed and total distance travelled. All this data is now being recorded iTrail's internal database. You can see what has been recorded so far by pressing the locations button in the top right. iTrail will record your location data approximately between every 10 and 60 seconds depending on what interval you choose in the Setting menu.  You can in also add your own waypoints to your trails to mark interesting things such as the location where you took a particular photograph. On the left you can see the screen that alows you to name the waypoint.

Workout over - Viewing your work-out data.

All your workout data has been recorded you can now see your progress on a map courtesy of Google and plot you sped and altitude versus distances on graphs. To do this simply press the My Trails button in the bottom tab bar. You will then see a list of all your recorded trails. select one, and you should then see its details screen, like the one on the left. Here there are a number of button for plotting graphs, viewing maps, continuing and deleting the trail.

Here is a graph showing your speed plotted versus the distance travelled. The maximum speed is shown on the top left.

This screen shows a Google map of the route taken on this trail.







Exporting GPS data to Google Docs

iTrail now supports the ability to export KML and GPX data, that can in turn be used by many mapping applications and other GPS devices. Currently this requires the use of Google Docs. Google Docs is an online document editing and management system, it can be found here. Below is the export screen in iTrail.

Once you have added your username and password, press the KML button if you want KML data exported. KML is the best format for Google Earth and Google Maps. GPX data I believe, is more readily understood by other GPS devices.

Now when you go to your Google Docs you should see the file you exported in your list of documents. You now need to move this to your local computer, so that you can upload it to your maping application or device. This is a somewhat manual process, here are the steps required :

  • Open the GPS data file in Google Docs.
  • Select all the text, go to the edit menu and press select all, or press ctrl-A
  • Copy the text by pressing ctrl-C
  • Open a text editor on your local computer, use something like TextWrangler on the Mac, and Notepad or TextPad on Windows.
  • Now paste the text you copied from Google Docs into the text editor by pressing ctrl-V.
  • Now save the file to your computer using a .kml extension for KML data and .gpx for GPX data.
  • You're done.

Note - Don't be tempted to use the "File > Download file as" menu option in Google Docs. This will mangle your file, and it will not work. Also don't use TextEditor on the Mac, it insists that you must save the file in a popular word-processor format, this will not work either. KML and gpx files are just plain text.

Now go to Google Maps. If you are still logged in to Google you should see a My Maps link in the top left. Click this. Now you should see a Create New Map link below. Click this. Now you should see an import link, click this, a box will come up that should allow you to upload you file to Google Maps. Select your file, then press the Upload from file button.

  • Now you are really done!

I realise all this is complicated. My apologies. I'm working on a better solution.